Seasons
by The-Lady-Isis
Summary: The cycle's always the same. Until it isn't.
1. Winter Sunshine

**Disclaimer: Square owns it. Not me.  
**

**Winter** **Sunshine**

He thinks of her sometimes in winter. It's like her, especially on clear days.

The winter sun – harsh, cruelly bright, glaring. Blindingly beautiful. When it hurts to look at it directly, and would burn if he tried to reach out and touch it. But this far away, it burns coldly, provides no warmth to chilled skin. The sunrises and sunsets throw deep honey-coloured light across everywhere he looks, so that he can't go anywhere without being faced with the golden sheen of her hair.

He goes outside in the mornings, and the air is crisp and fresh and cold. Just like her. Speaking would shatter the brittle clarity of the dawn, so he doesn't. Words are too inadequate to put this beauty into a fixed shape. He never used words when they were together.

The faint tang of sweetness that hits him when he walks past banks of alpine heather makes him wish he'd spent more time paying attention to what her scent was really like, because he thinks he remembers, but sometimes, he isn't sure.

On snowy days he likes to climb the Trabian mountain he's lived on since the end of the war. Holds a poetic justice that he thinks she'd like, him living in the place he destroyed. No-one knows the name of the quiet stranger who works alongside them to rebuild their devastated homes, and he prefers to keep it that way. Just before dawn, he stands on the summit to be closer to the sky, because it's always a darker shade of blue that way. When there aren't anymore clouds because the heavens have been snowed clean, he looks up and sees the deep sapphire of her eyes staring back at him with quiet magnificence.

The blank snow is pure, unfettered and immaculately flawless. He knows that the whiteness of the snow really is _too_ pale, but it still reminds him of the porcelain perfection of her satin smooth skin. When no-one else is up here, it's pristine and untouched and virginal. Except for his footprints. The only blemish on an otherwise perfect thing. If that isn't a cosmic metaphor for them, Hyne only knows what is. Even with the flaws he's put there, the radiance of it remains unadulterated.

And it's only here, when he's alone except for the winter, that he lets himself admit to it. To something even his closest friends aren't privy to. To the fact that maybe…maybe his hollow heart did find something that could fill it once. Perhaps there was… He shakes his head to no-one in particular, too proud and stubborn still to concede defeat to what she was. What she did to him. What she made him feel.

And even though the words never quite make it past his lips, he knows it's why he likes winter. It's like her.


	2. Summer Heat

**Summer** **Heat**

It's on the first day of summer that it happens. She looks out the window of her cold, barren room in Garden and sees the peak of life outside. And she remembers. She remembers because of the splendour in the world. Summer is the zenith of activity and ceaseless, restless movement. She recalls a man who was like summer all the time – never resting, never content to stop and still himself and just _be_.

So she watches with unconsealed longing while the verdant forests come alive and team with youthful vigour, full of prideful insolence that they will last forever. Birds and animals flit here and there between the pools of shadow, teasing her with their presence, only to snatch it away again and remind her that the illusion of ownership is just that. They – like him – never have been, never are and never truly will be hers. The magnitude of the life all around her thrills her nerves with its impetuous, audacious fearlessness, and she lusts to be able to taste that, to share in what must be the most ferocious way to live.

Then it's the dry, oppressive heat. When everything stands on the edge of the precipice between life and death. When she empathises with the earth, because she remembers what it's like to be burned by devouring flames and wish for an end to this slow, scorching death yet at the same time itch for more of the incandescent blaze of the sun that is tortuously searing you. When the fever finally pinnacles, there's an instant of vehement excitement while the world holds it breath for the glowing inferno of the climax.

Then the fire that will consume everything flares to life and swallows greedily with startling speed anything that's caught in the way. The cloying smoke rises up with the ambition and arrogance of darkness to possess everything it sees. She finds herself wishing for those moments, but no matter where she looks, she can't find them. When the pyre of the world is reduced to smouldering ashes, only the embers of her heart are left, no longer ablaze. Ready to wake from their zealous slumber at a moment's notice, but she's been unable to find anyone else that can kindle them.

When Garden's stationary, as it must be in heavy storms, she runs down to the wheat fields of Centra as fast as her legs will carry her. When she gets there, she'll sprint to the centre of the vast plain to be surrounded by the hurricane-tossed gold. She stands there for hours, running her hands over the rough surface of the life around her while the warm rain comes lashing down from the bruise-purple thunder clouds above. The water soaks her, coats her like a second skin, and she remembers with a wry smile that he always did think she looked good wet. She doesn't care that she's terribly exposed to the tumultuous lightning; she always was vulnerable when it came to him, and the electricity that Mother Nature can provide is nothing compared to the sparks that shot through her when he called her name at the height of climax. When the storm's blown itself out, as all such violence must, she's left with the warm smell of earth, cleansed and ready once more to burst into vitality.

And when, in the last dying gasp of summer, the heat becomes sticky and uncomfortable and everyone else complains about how hot it is, she only sits quietly and thinks to herself that they've never experience the true infatuation she has for the season. The unnameable, unfathomable eroticism that it contains. She listens to them rage about how they long for autumn, and realises that they don't know fury. They see summer. But they don't taste it. They don't savour it with the insatiable appetite and ardour that she does. In the stillness of the stuffy nights she lies awake, denying that _aches _for him with more intensity than her body should be able to possess, craves him with every breath and yearns for the sound of his voice with every heartbeat.

She loves the summer heat, because it brings a brief spell of such _passion _into her life that she knows it will sustain her, either until the summer bursts into the world once more, or he does.


	3. Dying Autumn

**Dying Autumn**

Autumn holds conflict for both of them.

He both dreads and longs for the onset of winter and the reminders of her that suddenly spread everywhere with the ice.

She hates saying goodbye to her annual gorging of the senses, yet feels that she needs the coming year to detoxify herself.

The raucous clash of colours mean very little. It is the natural process – consciously or not, all things yearn for a glorious death. That's all Mother Nature gives.

The first shiver that a cool breeze bears brings the same thought to both: _Enough now. It has to stop. Next year it'll be different. _Both know it won't be.

Autumn is the death of her feast, and the end of his fast.


	4. Renewed Spring

**Renewed Spring**

It's hard not to feel a certain hope in spring, when the first snowdrops win their battle with the iron-hard ground to bloom quietly. It just so happens, that this year it occurs on the same day, in Trabia and in Balamb.

She picks one in the morning on her way to work.

He picks one in the evening on his way back.

Both flowers are placed on display – one in a stem vase specifically for the purpose, as with everything around her. The other is placed in an empty beer bottle, standing proudly none the less.

It's not until they've faded and shrivelled and died that the picker of the evening flower makes a decision. He doesn't know why, or what'll happen, only that the time feels right. It's time the prodigal son returned. It's time he went home.

She's watering her little pot of new ferns when he arrives. She picked them because of the colour: a glowing, emerald green that she knows only appears in one other place, and since she can't have that she'll have to make do. She looks outside and decides that, yes, the sunset is pretty enough to brave the still-cool evening and watch it. Wrapping an old shirt that still smells like him around her shoulders, she heads out into the ecstatic explosion of red, orange and purple.

It's there on the beach that he finds her, half an hour later. He isn't surprised when she isn't surprised when he comes to stand beside her. Without words, a large rough hand joins with a softer, smaller one in between them. They watch the sun go down together. Then she turns with a soft kiss and an afterthought. "Welcome back."

He just smiles – really – for what has to be the first time in years, and returns her kiss, sharing with her a spark of that fire she's craved. "Thank you."

And as they head back into Garden, they're both content. He doesn't need the winter anymore, and she no longer hungers for summer. They share the renewal of spring.

**A/N: There you go, the drabble's out of my system. All is good, review please!**


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